ABSTRACT
Etica' opens with an apparently straightforward choice between opposing conceptions of the relationship between art and belief. Octavio Paz's recourse to the Catholic order of the Middle Ages for a belief that afforded a sense of 'humanidad trascendente' might seem odd given his leftist allegiance. Paz employs a Marxist rhetoric of historical analysis, but then finds in that analysis a need for belief that removes him from a conventional Marxist position. Once the spectres have been raised of history and consciously articulated belief, the cheerful accord of Carlos Pellicer's poems comes to seem less a matter of identification between self and world than of careful exclusion on the part of the poet. Eliot appears in a climate which is riven with polemic but at the same time surprisingly tolerant of sympathies and interests that run counter to explicit statements of allegiance, as Paz's contradictory relationship to the Contemporaneos reveals.
